Do Japanese think of historical time as happening "in front" (前) of them?

Question

According to Wiktionary, the etymology for the kanji 前 means "[walking] forward":

Originally 歬, an ideogrammic compound (會意): 止 (“foot”) + 舟 (“boat”) – a foot on a boat moving forward. Alternatively, 舟 represents a shoe (cf. Shuowen 履: 舟象履形) — a foot with a shoe on to walk forward.

Now consider the sentence

これは11年前の新聞だ。

which means

This is a newspaper from 11 years ago.

What's strange about this to me (as a native English speaker) is that the 11 years of past time are placed forward. In English, I believe we typically think of "years ago" as happening "behind" (後) us, no? Yet here "forward" (前) is being used.

Question: Is my understanding correct? Do native Japanese think of past time as happening "in front" of them (前)?

Or do Japanese think of time just as native English speakers do, and I'm fundamentally confused about something :-)

Answer 1

Those expressions do seem like they expand a spatial meaning onto a temporal meaning, but I would suggest a spatial meaning different from what you seem to be getting at.

I don't believe most people put themselves at the center and imagine what they would have ahead of and behind of themselves, when thinking about this まえ and あと. Instead, I believe it's more like the front of a queue vs the back of a queue. You might or might not be in the queue, you might be looking at an entirely different direction, not towards the first nor towards the last in the queue - the point of view doesn't change front vs back here.

To expand on it, think of time as a series of events written (and going to be written) in a book. You have the concept of "front" and "back" of a book in English (as in "front matter"). This vaguely reminds me of the Japanese (or rather, Chinese) terms 前半 and 後半. Same goes with other Japanese expressions like まえのほう, あとのほう, in non-kanji words. It looks like English only deals with the extremities with this "front" and "back", though, where Japanese and Chinese deal with a broader range of related concepts.

Expressions like 11年前 can be understood as going towards the front by 11 years in the Book of Time, so to speak.

What I wrote above is exclusively about how today's Japanese speaking (non-expert) people might think. For etymological explanations, I defer to others. This link might help: Why does 前 mean "past" in terms of time, but "forward" in terms of direction?

Answer 2

As others have pointed out, Japanese is actually arguably no different than English in this regard. English speakers commonly use the word "before" to mean both "physically in front of" and "earlier in time" too.

I'm not an expert, but I believe this arises out of thinking of time as an ordered series of events, and when ordering things things closer to the beginning are considered to be "before" things that are later in the order. This is also reflected by things like talking about moving something "up" or "down" in a list, etc.

This may be related to physical orientation by the fact that if you have multiple people, for example, in a queue, or marching in a line from one place to another, the "first person in line" is also considered to be the person in front of the line.

Another way to think about this is that if you have a line of people heading towards some destination, the person in front will arrive at that destination first, and therefore their arrival will happen "before" everyone else's in time as well (or for people in a queue, the people at the front will be able to perform their transactions earlier in time than the ones in the back of the queue, etc).

But I don't think that Japanese speakers think of time fundamentally differently than English speakers do in this regard. They use 前 in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that English speakers use "before"...